Crossing the Brandywine
I’m more than a month into my journey, and I’ve taken far too many steps. Backpacking is a great way to get to know your city and the people in it, but adventurers can’t always walk. Frodo had to take Bucklebury Ferry to cross the Brandywine, but I don’t have such luxuries on my journey (of course, I also don’t have the fate of the world on my shoulders either, but we’re going to ignore that small detail. Without a barge to cross the Brandywine, I’ll have to swim it. From this point onwards, I will count swimming miles as miles towards my goal. It is significantly more difficult to swim these miles, even after weighing myself down with my pack, but adventurers need to be diverse in their skillsets. We adventurers are adaptable, and I’ve got a river to cross. Day one of swimming didn’t go so great. In my apartment complex, some parents have trouble controlling their little goblins. They ran about screaming, shooting each other with super soakers, leaping in at the stairs, and (of course) cutting me off every three seconds of my swimming laps. Were they the appropriate size for their age, they’d dart from one side of the pool to the other with little regard for drag or obstacles (such as adventurers). However, they were not. Each one was roughly the shape of a fishing bobber, and exactly as fast, making them a hazard to avoid. Goblins are quick to anger, so instead of taking pictures of them, I gathered this image to use as a visual aid.
The ordeal got so chaotic, dodging a relentless hail of fat goblin children, that I grabbed a pint, sat in a sun chair, and waited for the little devils’ to raid themselves tired. Their father, a great, fat goblin, sat across from me, puffing his cigar and spitting venom back and forth with his wife, a particularly unpleasant goblin who’d been shooting me mean looks for trespassing on their river crossing. Even so, any good adventurer is also a patient one, and goblins of such rotund nature fatigue quickly. It was a battle of endurance, and I had all night. Sure enough, the mother goblin screeched to her children before too long and they bobbed their way out of the pool. I’d only managed half a mile before the onslaught drove me off course so I had a lot of making up to do. I hopped back into the pool and paddled along. That said, an adventurer is always prepared, and I was not. A belly full of beer restricted me to only one more mile of swimming before I needed to call it a night. In another failure to prepare, I didn’t take a single picture of myself at the pool. Even so, all adventures have their fair share of hiccups, and a mile and a half of swimming isn’t so bad. I’ll need to swim again further down the road, but for my next update, it seems that orcs are blocking my path, and it will take more than patience to fend them off.
